The Classics & Australian Culture Wars

Mark Rolfe

The recent ‘culture wars’ in Australia follow a tradition of engaged rhetoric that originated during the time of Alex de Tocqueville, and . So began a linguistic formula connecting culture, class, right leadership, moral worth and democracy. Culture became part of the ethical appeal of politicians, such as . The formula took a more pessimistic turn in the 1920s with the propaganda model. claims the post-modern cultural elites undermine traditional education and the classics, however the consumer society undermined the moral place of the classics in our society. Howard’s interest in the classics has more to do with attacking the left and a concern with purging ‘wrong’ ideas.

Keywords: Rhetoric, classics, democracy, propaganda, Robert Menzies, John Howard, culture wars.

On the eighteenth of February 1963 Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia since 1949 and leader of the rightwing Liberal Party, told Queen Elizabeth II and a dinner audience that Australian affection for the monarch could be put “in the words of that old seventeenth century poet who wrote, ‘I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die’.” The Queen is on film wincing at this declaration. We do not know whether she felt distaste but that has been the reaction of many who cringed at his reverence and mocked his Britishness as antiquated in a modern Australia. However, the day has another significance that differentiates Menzies from his party and ideological successor John Howard, their views of knowledge and their social contexts. Such distinctions are important for Howard is not another conservative Menzies upholding traditional Australian values, although much of his public credibility lies in making such claims. His education reforms have less to do with preserving Western culture and more to do with attacking the left in the so-called culture wars which have dominated Australian political discourse since the 1990s. The reforms have more in common with a propaganda model than with the liberal education Menzies understood and consequently they may damage the very thing they purport to save.

1. Democracy, Culture & Ethos That day in 1963 is a moment when the country was changing and Australians since then have not understood what Menzies was doing. Until the 1960s Australians understood that high culture made a person a truly 150 The Classics and Australian Culture Wars ______civilised human being. Menzies was born in 1894 and was one of the last in a line of barrister-politicians since the nineteenth century who established their credibility as upright men with voters by quoting from the political and literary classics. High culture was a part of many politicians’ ethos,one of three means of proofs in rhetoric, which aims to garner the trust of an audience. No matter how rational, a speech will fall on deaf ears if an audience does not respect the credibility and character of the orator, who must employ the values of the audience and of the society in which they live.1 Menzies remembered thousands of lines of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and many other poets whom he quoted in speeches.2 Our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, had a similar predilection. Our first prime minister, , liked to pepper his early parliamentary speeches with Greek and Latin quotations, which he learnt in a degree in classics and English literature at Sydney University under the famed scholar Charles Badham.3 According to Greg Melleuish, Badham argued that:

the university man trained in the techniques of a liberal education would possess a clear consciousness, ‘full of reverence, refinement and clear-headedness ... by the very conditions of his discipline temperate in opinion, temperate in measures, temperate in demeanour.’4

Temperance and refinement were important virtues in the wake of Democracy in America by Alex de Tocqueville in 1835. He applauded democracy but feared the tyranny of the majority. Here was the old Platonic anxiety about mob rule that passed to John Stuart Mill. He was a friend of democracy yet feared for individual rights against public opinion.5 His solution was an elite that could educate the working class to the right path.6 However, his fear was cultivated by a linguistic construction that is our legacy. Mill made the individual so good by making public opinion look so bad. He relied on a conception of the collective thoughts of ordinary people that was free-floating, homogenous, passive, child-like and separated from reason. It could be loved, moved, and manipulated but so could be corrupted with wrong ideas. Thus it needed leading by a proper elite, otherwise democracy was endangered.7 This abstraction acquired more sinister tones with the century, as we shall see. Right leadership meant a cultured leadership and here we come to the moral purpose of knowledge. Like Mill, Matthew Arnold thought that a cultured middle class was necessary to lead society. Thus, he set “sweetness and light,” or beauty and truth, as great spiritual and intellectual bulwarks against the horrors of materialism. Culture was for him “the best that has been thought and said in the world” and this passed to others as a reverence for the classics. Culture was that rampart against self-indulgence and the